wavesoflife

As those who read the cut entry I last posted know, I was considering signed up for the Station Access account for EQII. Well, Joe and I both signed up for it that night. Today Sony annouced they will be adding SWG to the Station Access plan Feb. 1. I plan on reopening Raea’s account since it’s on the same user ID as EQII on Feb. 1. After all, it’s basically free. I don’t know if I’ll play, especially since everyone that I liked in the guild has left, but I’ll be able to check out the combat rebalance once it happens. I don’t know if I’ll re-open Alundra’s account ever…since I will have to pay $15 extra for that. I got used to having two characters there though…it made working on image designer much easier.

In EQII, I finally made level 20 on a character. Calandra is now a level 20 Conjurer. She’s got a cool looking fire serpent thing following her around. I also made a dark-elf named Solia that I plan to betray to Qeynos, to be either an Illusionist or a Mystic.

Hahah, I’m way unsurprised by this.

1985 by Bowling for Soup

“Where’s the mini-skirt made of snakeskin? And who’s the other guy that’s singing in Van Halen? When did reality become T.V.? What ever happened to sitcoms, game shows?” You took the bitter with the sweet in 2004 – and kept laughing.

Apparently, there is some displeasure at the nominations for the 2004 Weblogs Awards – Best Blog Design category. There are a variety of complaints about them. Some were designed by other people or by design companies. Some are very plain and some are very graphical. Some are “too girly”. I can see the legitimacy of all the complaints except the “too girly” one. When you just have one Best Design category, it’s like trying to compare apples and oranges. You have the minimalistic blogs that focus on readability. You have the sites that focus on a more graphical approach. Who’s to say which is better designed? But if you tried to seperate them into different categories, it would be hard to set a dividing line. Some sites border in the middle. As for the blogs that were designed by other people, that’s again hard to decide how to handle. I do not feel they should be disallowed though…after all, it’s still a blog design.

Another complaint is that some of these blogs just have nice header graphics and not very well-designed content (actual blog part). I have to agree on this. I saw that in a few of the ones on there and on many while surfing through blogs in general. On a related note, I’ve always disliked blogs that have a huge header graphic…so big that you have to scroll to get to the actual content.

I was surprised at some of the sites that were selected…I know of other better designed ones out there. I do have to say though that some of the ones that were nominated definately deserve the nomination. I didn’t even know of these awards until some sites I read mentioned the final nominations page…so I didn’t get to nominate any of the better designed blogs that I know of.

I haven’t gotten much comment spam…none on here at all, and several on a few other of my weblogs. In the past few days though, I’ve seen an increase in the amount of comment spam on others weblogs so I decided to be proactive.

A great resource I found is: WordPress: Tackling Comment Spam. It has a number of different plug-ins to try. I already use the auto shut-off comments (after 30 days) plug-in. I added this code to my wp-comments-post file to prevent spammers from commenting on posts that don’t exist (thus when I would post an entry with that ID, spam would already be on it). I also added an image authenication system. Now when you want to comment on one of my entries, you have to type in the number that’s in the image. If you type the number in wrong, you’ll likely have to retype your comment, just so you know. I tried the two other image authenication methods first, but they didn’t work. This one did.